Update: Short Code SEO is now available for download. Just go back to your personal download page to get your copy.

***

This new plugin is from an idea by regular Mike C (hi Mike!) who has been threatening me with telling me about this idea of his for a while now.

He finally shared it with me and I think it’s pretty damn cool so we started work on a prototype last week.

As we’ve all discussed it back and forth at this end it’s sort of grown a bit from the orginal idea, and I was amazed to read an email today about a WSO that does some of what I’ve asked to be added to my own plugin.

I actually don’t think this other WSO is as good as what we’re doing, and it’s a lot more money. (It sort of makes me wonder if I charge enough for my products, but there you go.)

What does my new plugin do?

First, it enables you to create short codes with any content you wish and add them to your site. This content includes HTML so you can pretty much put anything you like in them.

Secondly…

Let me explain Mike’s specific problem. He has local business clients who are expanding into new geographical areas. They know that it’s a good idea to take out new domains for the new areas they’re moving into. That allows them to put a local tracking phone number on their new site so they can see where the calls are coming from.

As a side-effect they can also use it to take out a new Google places entry for their new region.

Mike clones the original site to the new domains and then has to go through the sites changing addresses and phone numbers etc. What should be a 30 minute job can end up taking all day.

So what we’ve done is created a plugin that comes with some built in values such as street name, postal code, phone number etc – you can also add your own of course. These are then used as short code tags on your (or your client’s) site. When you clone the site to a new domain then it’s a 5 minute job to change these values and see every instance of them change on the new domain.

Pretty good so far yes?

Then we had the bright idea of adding in some SEO to the mix.

You’ll also be able to specify that the built in shortcodes (plus any that you add) should also optionally create meta “name” tags and place the detail in the header area of the blog.

It turns out there are some very useful meta names in existence, but not so many people know about them.

Examples of some of these meta name tags are contactStreetAddress1, contactZipCode, geo.position and geo.region. Together these tell search engines like Google exactly where your business is based. So your header might contain something like this:-

With that extra bit of information for the search engines, that should mean that your (and your client’s) sites should rank even higher for your (their) local area.

I don’t know yet, but it may even cause the auto generation of an “unclaimed” Google places listing – obviously I’ve not tested this as there hasn’t been time but it seems completely possible to me that this could happen. (We *will* be testing this with a new site we’ve recently set up for a local client.)

Okay?

I suspect that this plugin may well end up being an enormous seller with a much higher price so get it today is my advice.

Today Friday 9th March at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running a pre-order sale for a really cool new plugin created by my new developer who I’m pleased to say is one of the most professional coders I’ve ever dealt with.

As usual I’ve had this plugin developed for my own purposes and I know you’ll find it very handy to own too.

It’s called Unique Ad Rotator (UAR) and allows you to run banner ads of varying sizes in your sidebars.

Here’s why I had it developed. On some of my blogs I run small 125×125 ads promoting various products. I generally prefer static ads to moving ones as I personally find moving ads irritating, and I figure that if I do then so do other people – that’s my reasoning.

But sometimes you don’t always want the same ads to show the whole time. Another plugin called Ads Manager (that I give away as a bonus with other plugins and themes) addresses part of that by allowing you to set rules as to when the ad should show, but it’s always the same ads on the same pages.

After some clunky testing I discovered that I got a better return if I varied the ads being displayed. That was when I realised that what I needed was some slick method of swapping them out and replacing them with another one and this was how the idea for UAR was born.

Then there was a bit of thought and what we came up with was a very flexible method of creating a group and then adding in some ads to that group. You can then place that ad group in your sidebar and at an interval decided by you, the ad will be replaced with the next one in the rotation. It does this in real time.

The idea is you place an ad group (or several) and set your ad rotation to say 50-60 seconds or more. That’s how I’ll be using it.

Your visitor lands on your site and sees the ads. They click or not. They read the post and scroll down as they go. When they’re done they may either leave the site, leave a comment, or scroll up to the menus.

(I usually do at least one of the last two when I visit a site. I may leave a comment, but whether I do or not I always go up to the menus at the top for a quick click around. I think it’s reasonable to assume that if the site isn’t left right away that one of the other two will happen.)

When your visitor scrolls back up, they will see a completely different set of ads in your sidebar. And then it’s click or not time again – maybe this new set of ads will appeal more to your visitor.

Of course you don’t have to make every ad slot a rotator, you can still run some static ads where you know they convert well.

Finally, as the ads change in real time, I also asked for some nice javascript transitions between them so that if your visitor happens to have the ads in view, they’ll see them change and that will certainly warrant a second look.

To recap…

You have ad groups. You can set a default rotation time for the ads in the group. You can add ads to the ad group. You can override the rotation time etc for each ad so that some stay longer or shorter. You can set an ad size for the group. The ads have cool looking javascript transitions.

This is a PRE-ORDER sale. We’re putting the final touches to the plugin now and it will probably be available on Monday 12th, but I didn’t think it was worth delaying the traditional weekend sale that so many people like.

The PRE-ORDER sale for this brand new plugin will start today Friday 9th March at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST). The earlier you buy, the lower the price.

The sale pricing will work like this:-

1-25 = $10.0026-50 = $12.5051-100 = $15.00100+ = $27.00

Offering these low prices to you is my way of saying thank you for being a subscriber.

The plugin works like this. Go to the plugin admin and add a new feed group.

Once you’ve created your new feed group you can start adding events to it.

Give your new event a name, start date and time and a description or “story”.

And that’s it. It’s not hard to do at all.

You can add as many feeds and events as you like, and as each event reaches the time and date for it to go live, it automatically gets published into the feed.

Your subscribers if using a tool like Feed Notifier or Feed Notifier Portable (tell them about it) will get the updates as soon as they happen. This is all far faster than making a blog post or sending out an email.

***

I’m gently frothing at the mouth over this one (I apologise if that’s too graphical for you) and I think you’re going to love this as much as I do.

This plugin is fantastic and has the potential to change the way you do business and keep your subscribers informed and I’m going to be using it heavily myself.

And I have to ask myself “Why didn’t I…” / “Why haven’t I…” latched onto this a long time ago?

I think it might be because I didn’t get the background to it properly, but now I do.

Let me explain – there’s all sorts of reasons and things going on that have resulted in arriving at this place and plugin. If I sound a bit “random” or disjointed in trying to explain this, don’t be surprised as I’m really excited about it all.

What this new plugin does is allow you to create groups and then add time driven events to those groups into the admin panel. The group then gets published as a special RSS feed…

Aha!

So you add a new event and set a date and time plus the event details (a description that can contain HTML) and when the time arrives the event gets published within the special RSS feed you created.

This new feed is completely separate from your regular WP feed.

You can create as many groups (feeds) as you like and as many events in each group as you want.

These new feeds don’t have to have anything whatsoever to do with the blog they’re hosted on. That means you don’t have to install the plugin on every blog if you don’t want to, you can just install it on your main site and create feeds to suit you.

You can create private and public feeds – they’re actually the same but you get to tag them private or public as a way of organising them all.

Here’re the benefits of the private feeds and this is partly why I’m really excited about this plugin.

Details about public feeds are further down.

You can create a private feed using an obscure feed name and put all sorts of reminders for future events in there.

o Phone the accountant on Tuesday after 11:00.
o Get a birthday card for your mother/wife/budgie.
o Pick up the dry cleaning.
o Get the car serviced.
o Join the webinar you signed up for.
o Get that new plugin Frank Haywood has released.

and so on.

You read all the feeds using your favourite RSS feed reader (e.g. Feed Reader for Windows) which runs quietly in your system tray and which is now an indispensible tool for me. Alternatively there’s a FireFox addon called RSS Ticker if like me you spend your entire online life with FireFox open.

When the feed updates, your RSS reader lets you know and you don’t ever miss an appointment again.

Well, you know what I mean…

Now let’s look at public feeds and events. These are even better!

I get people complaining to me that I send them too many emails. I also get people complaining to me that I don’t keep them updated enough and then they’re annoyed when they miss things.

I can’t win can I?

It will soon be fixed.

To update your normal WP RSS feed, you need to publish a new post – that’s the only way you can do it. But that’s not always an appropriate thing to do is it?

It’s fine if you have a lot to say, but if you just want to keep people updated about something such as a new plugin release, then you don’t want to create a whole blog post just to do that do you?

This new plugin is perfect for doing small updates and notifications. Smaller than a blog post, bigger than a tweet. Far more control over content.

For instance you could create a WSO update feed for your subscribers, and each day (or whenever) publish some short detail about the WSOs you think are worth getting. Not worth a blog post, not worth a broadcast email, but more required than a tweet.

Or maybe a special interest feed? I know for a fact I have a group of people on my mailing lists that are intrested in online marketing and another group that are only interested in offline marketing, and some who are into both. Create two feeds and let people subscribe to one the other or both of them.

(In fact it’s even possible to mix different feeds from different sources together and producing one big fat one with everything in it – I’ll talk about that another time.)

Doing it like that you’re far less likely to annoy your main mailing lists and those who want updates more often can easily get them.

Isn’t that REALLY cool?

Can you see why I’m excited about this?

And can you see why I’ll be pushing people to subscribe to RSS feeds in future?

You can do EXACTLY the same thing as I’ll be doing.

And let’s not forget the increasing amount of people out there who have smart phones with RSS readers on them, and who are gagging to add alerts and stuff and keep themselves amused and updated with what’s going on.

Yeah? Get it? I didn’t and I’ve never been bothered before because I never got it and there wasn’t anything that could do what this plugin does. That all changes today.

At 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) today I’m running a pre-sale for the RSS Events plugin at just $10.

Here’s your chance to get it at the lowest price it will ever be, because once this sale is over it’s going straight up to $27, so grab it today while you can.

(If you’re one of the people that’s been asking for more updates you’ll be getting them via one of my events feeds very soon.)

I KNOW that RSS doesn’t seem very exciting and can be a source of confusion and annoyance – I’ve been there. But I’ve really turned onto it this last year or so and I’ve been using it for all sorts of things. I’m only talking here about reading feeds not creating them.

But, I’ve been thinking about RSS related products that would be useful to you and me, and I have a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for creating useful feeds.

The first one I released last year and is an excellent plugin that you install on all your blogs and on all your clients blogs too (if you have them).

This is how it works.

Imagine the situation if like me you have more than one WordPress blog, and I BET you do.

Unless you log into them all each day, it’s really hard to keep on top of which ones have plugins or themes that need updating. Not all of them will have the same plugins active, and certainly not all of them will have the same themes.

There are both plugins and themes out there that sometimes have security issues which allow hackers to log in and take control of your site. So it’s important that when there’s an update, you know about it right away and you can apply it to keep your blog secure.

It gets even more important when you also have clients blogs that you look after.

It’s bad enough when your own sites get hacked, but the last thing you want is a client calling you to say their site is up the Swannee. Imagine the embarrassment.

The WP Updates RSS plugin solves that problem.

It monitors your blog and creates a private feed that you can add to Feed Notifier. When an update is needed, it updates the feed, you get a little pop-up on your desktop and you can go make the update.

You know what? I think I’ve just made Feed Notifier a must-have tool for any WordPress user.

Starting today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running a weekend sale for the WP Updates RSS plugin at just $10 for the first 25 buyers. The price will go up after the first 25 sales and the sale will close on Monday.

I’ll drop you a line when the sale starts.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. There’s another RSS based plugin coming next week which I hope will blow your socks off.

I’d like to call this a weekend sale, but I thought I’d finish up before Christmas with v2 of a plugin called Clone and Backup.

I first released this plugin in January this year at v1 and it’s gone through several changes and bugfixes until we finally have v2. If you purchased it before now, just go back to your personal download page and get the new version as there’s no upgrade fee for early buyers. I decided to do that because we had quite a few problems with the first few versions and different server configs.

The original version was lightning fast (5 seconds or less) but we ran into problems with servers that couldn’t handle the speed or the (sometimes) massive file sizes generated and it caused failures. So we slowed everything down by splitting things up into smaller chunks and it’s now much more reliable for everyone.

We think we made the right compromise of reliability over speed, and I haven’t seen any problems since we did that.

What does the plugin do?

It will clone or backup (to a zip file) your WordPress blog and optionally it will include non-WordPress files too.

The clone function allows you to specify another domain on another server (target) and it will FTP your entire source blog to that domain and install WordPress for you. All the menu permalinks are auto-adjusted to the target domain so that they don’t point back to the source.

This means that if you’re in the habit of installing lots of WordPress blogs (like we do), you can create a standard source blog with all your favourite themes and plugins installed and activated, and clone the entire thing to another domain. You then have a really good starting point to set the site up the way you want it.

Or you can just use it to backup your existing blog to a zip file and download it.

Or for speed, you can specify the FTP details for a backup server on the settings page.

You then just check a box and click the “Process Now” button, and the blog is zipped up and sent to your backup server.

Or you can even do all of the above at the same time. It’s pretty cool.

You’ve probably seen plugins like this priced at $47 to $97 (it’s hard to get this right and the prices reflect it), but today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) you can pick up Clone and Backup in this final 25-copies-only sale at just $17.

In the new year, the plugin will go on sale at its regular (much higher) price on its own web site, so this is your last chance to get what I think is the bargain of the year.

Small demo slideshow – you can make the images as large as you like. Some of these images have text with links in them, some of the images are clickable, and some have both. You can change the speed, controls displayed, and also have a choice of animations between slides.

[pgsm-slideshow id=”1″]

***

Before creating this plugin, I tried out or looked at over 20 different image slider managers. These were either WordPress plugins or standalone scripts.

If you look around yourself you’ll see so many of these that I thought there must at least be ONE that does what I need, but I could hardly believe it when I found that NONE of them do…

All I wanted to do for some of my sites was to be able to insert sliders at the top of some of my pages that would rotate between banners and screenshots, and also allow me to place a selection of different slider ads in my sidebar that only occupied one position and showed a different ad every few seconds.

I also wanted the slider images to optionally display text and HTML with clickable links.

I wanted to be able to make the whole slider image itself clickable so I could put “Click Here” graphics on the image.

And finally I wanted it to work with any theme.

That’s not a big requirement is it? But the small list of things I need the plugin to do are VERY useful to us marketers.

Here’s the thing. I’ve found that until creating this that there’s no plugin that does all of what we need. There are plugins that will allow us to add ONE slider to a page or post, but not multiple sliders.

There are comprehensive plugins that do image gallery management and display, but not sliders.

There are plugins that allow clickable links OR clickable images, but not both.

There are plugins that only work by editing the theme code and pasting in some PHP.

And so on. I don’t think ANY of the sliders worked with widgets.

It’s almost unbelievable isn’t it? But I’ve seen this same issue time and time again.

Developers write code for other developers. Most developers don’t get or understand (or even want to) marketing.

Developers miss the little subtleties that we marketers require. And it’s the little things that make the difference between what works and generates additional revenue for us, and what ends up as frustration.

So…

I had Slider Manager developed, and it does ALL the things we need most of all from a slider.

My #1 priority in developing this was to get it working and keep it simple. Sometimes you can’t avoid complicated, but I try to avoid it wherever possible.

So what you can do is create multiple sliders (groups) and of course multiple images within each slider.

Within each slider group, you specify the width and height, pause and animation time, and a selection of animation effects.

Each image can have text and a HTML link added to it, or you can make the image clickable. Or BOTH.

When you save the slider group it generates a short code tag that you can then add anywhere in your POSTS and PAGES and also in your TEXT WIDGETS!

In a few hours (at 6.00pm GMT, 2.00pm EST) I’ll be opening a 25-copies-only sale at $10.00 for the WordPress Promo Tools plugin.

This is one you really don’t want to miss, it’s one of the coolest little plugins I’ve ever created. I did a short pre-launch for it a few months ago and then took it away, and it’s now about to go officially live.

If you’re a new subscriber or you missed it in the Spring, then this is your last chance to get it at a knock-down price.

Plugins like this one and other sales helper plugins I’ve released up to now will all come into play as part of a winning strategy to build your business that I’m going to share with you.

You. Will. See.

Another month and you’ll be going “Ohhh! That’s what he was on about! Clever clogs…”

If you miss it, then you’re going to end up paying a LOT more than the price it is today, at a later date when the penny drops.

But for today if you’re fast you can get it at just $10.00 in this sale. First come first served.

What does it do?

The Promo Tools plugin can help you by allowing you to easily create WordPress pages that you can fill with promo tools you create for your affiliates such as pre-written blog posts, articles, emails, forum signatures and banners.

(Click the images for larger versions.)

So once you’ve set up the tools, all an affiliate has to do is paste their aff link into the box at the top and every single promo tool on the page gets auto-populated with their affiliate link.

Here’s demo of an image link generated from the example code above.

Then they can copy the generated HTML code for banners etc and paste it directly into their web site.

It’s really cool to do this for your affiliates and you’ll benefit greatly from it too.

It makes the whole process a lot simpler for affiliates, and the easier it is then the more likely they are to promote for you.

It’s not always about percentage commission, sometimes it’s about how fast and easy it is to do, and if you make your affiliates have to jump through hoops, then it becomes more unlikely they’ll promote for you.

Use this plugin, and make it easy for them (and you).

At 6.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST) today (3rd November) this page will be updated with the buy button.

Please don’t get here too late and then end up writing to me to say you missed it. This happens quite a lot.

This is a great little plugin and if you have any kind of aspirations towards becoming successful online, then you’re going to need this one. It’s definitely one for your marketing arsenal.

Today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m starting a weekend sale for a plugin I predict you’ll want to install on all your blogs. At first glance it’s quite unassuming, but once you realise how the Scripts Manager plugin saves you a big fat headache you’ll realise how useful it really is.

In fact I rely on it so often that I take it for granted.

I was only reminded how useful it was when one of my friends – Martin Salter – said “That is freaking awesome!”

I’ve been doing some work with Martin on a project (more on that another time) and I’d changed the theme about three times when Martin told me I was breaking some code he’d added to the original theme.

D’oh!

It turns out he’d added some javascript affiliate code to the header.php, and also amended functions.php to add some Twitter code. Every time I updated or changed the theme, the javsacript and PHP he’d added disappeared.

Aha!

As soon as I realised what was going on, I showed him the Scripts Manager plugin and that’s when I received that “Awesome!” comment.

This plugin allows you to add javascript code to both the header and footer areas of your WordPress installation without changing any of the theme code. After I realised Martin was also adding PHP into the functions file of the theme, I had Scripts Manager tweaked to include the ability to do that too.

So with this plugin you can now easily add javascript and PHP to your blog without having to fiddle with theme code. You can do this globally, and even override individual pages and posts with other code if you want to.

(For the more technically minded you can also add “onload” javascript too.)

The beauty of this is that you can change themes as many times as you like and everything just continues to work as it should.

Like I said, I rely on this plugin so much that I install it on every blog, add my javascript tracking code for StatCounter (you can use it with Google Analytics just as easily) to the footer section and then forget about it.

If a few weeks later I change the theme or upload a new version of it, so what? My tracking code and functions etc just keep on working.

It’s only when you’ve gone through the pain of finding you’ve not been tracking visitors or some other code hasn’t been working for the last two weeks that you realise how completely useful it is.

If you don’t already have this plugin, then the final pre-launch sale starts today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) at just $10 for the first 25 buyers. This post will update at that time to present the buy button.

After this weekend sale is over or when 100 sales occur, the price of the plugin will rise to $27.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you DO already have this plugin, then it’s a free update to the latest version. Just go back to your download page and you can grab it from there.

On Tuesday 18th October at 6.00pm GMT I’m releasing a brand new plugin called “Get Plugins” that I had written for my own purposes and to tie in with the work I’m currently doing in the offline niches.

It’s amazingly useful and I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before.

You know how when you install a new blog (or worse still you’re working with an existing one that might be a clients installation) and there are certain “must have” plugins that need installing? Usually you can either FTP them all up at once (which is how I’ve done it up to now) or install them one at a time by using the browser uploader.

FTP is easy enough and I guess quick enough (unless there are lots of files in a plugin), but sometimes if you’re working with someone else’s blog, they don’t give you (or don’t want to give you, or sometimes they don’t know) their FTP details.

So then you’re stuck with having to upload them all via the browser or search through the WordPress repository in the admin panel and adding them that way. It’s a pain.

Either way it can take a long time if you have about 15-20 standard plugins to install. Especially if you’re working with several new blogs per day.

What this new plugin does is allow you to set up your list of plugin locations in advance, and the plugin will go fetch them from wherever they’re located and install them all for you.

This can be a location in the WordPress repository for free plugins you’re using, or a location on one of your own domains if it’s a premium plugin.

All you have to do is know the URL where each zip is located and either do a quick copy and paste into a box, or just upload a text file with all the URLs in. For extra speed you can even add the text file into the plugin zip if you want to and the plugin will find it when it’s uploaded.

So now instead of installing all your plugins one at a time, you get to install the whole lot in one go.

Pretty cool eh?

When you click the “Submit” button, then all the plugins in the list are retrieved concurrently and independently of the others, so there’s no waiting for each one to complete before the next one starts – they all run at the same time.

The pre-launch sale will start Tuesday 18th October at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), and I’ll send you more details and a reminder before then.

I wonder if you have any suggestions for some favourite plugins you’d like to see in the default text file list of plugins we include? If you do, please leave the full URL of the zip file AND the page it’s on when you make the comment.

Jeff L (hi Jeff) asked which script or plugin I was using. Well, it’s one of my own plugins, and I realised that while I use it constantly for all kinds of things, I hadn’t promoted this for quite some time. D’oh!

And the thing is, it’s exceptionally useful and very easy to use as it hooks into the WordPress permalink system.

This is one that’s well worth picking up even if you don’t yet do affiliate marketing because it will track clicks and cloak them if you want it to. It will also allow you to store details of the affiliate program right inside your WordPress blog.

So how does it work?

After installation and activation, you’ll see a new admin settings menu called “PG Affiliate Link Cloaker”.

Clicking this will take you to a page containing a list of all the affiliate links as you add them.

To add a link, simply create a new Page or Post – we suggest you use Pages, but there might be some circumstances where you want to use Posts.

On the Page creation screen, if you scroll down you’ll see a new section called “Affiliate Link Cloaker”. There you can add your affiliate link, cloak or hide it from menus and even store your login details for the affiliate program.

Looks pretty good doesn’t it? I use it all the time to track clicks, I don’t just use it for my affiliate links.

Today Friday 7th October at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’m making this available in a weekend sale at just $10.00 for the first 25 buyers before including it on the Plugin Great site at a regular price of $27.00.

You can either check back here then, or keep an eye on your email for a reminder.